How Edward Bernays and His Uncle Sigmund Freud Set the Stage for Today's LGBT+ Neo-Marxist Culture War
How Freud's book "The Future of an Illusion" and Bernays's book "Propaganda" Led to the Sexual Revolution
This Essay is an excerpt from my book Bad Samaritans: The ACLU’s Relentless Campaign to Erase Faith from the Public Square.
Even during his lifetime, Edward Bernays was widely credited with being the father of modern public relations. But it is equally important to understand the influence the Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, Bernays’s uncle, had on the mass marketing techniques developed by Bernays and introduced to the American public via Madison Avenue. From Freud, Bernays learned that people could be manipulated to modify their behavior, or to internalize key social and political ideas by appealing to their subconscious desires. It’s rarely appreciated that Freud had launched his own war on religion, a war Bernays ultimately advanced by developing the techniques of propaganda.
In 1927 Freud published a short but influential book called The Future of an Illusion, in which the illusion under discussion was religion. He followed this with the 1929 publication of another short book, Civilization and its Discontents. The key idea of both polemics was that human beings created religion in order to restrain and control subconscious sexual desires that would be disruptive to society if allowed full expression. Freud believed this social control mechanism was detrimental, in that evolutionary theory required human force and power to be fully expressed if natural selection and the “survival of the fittest” were to be allowed to operate. The goal, according to Freud, was to advance the species with the science of psychology, every bit as much as Darwin sought to advance the species with the science of evolution. For Freud and for Darwin, religion stood as an impediment, an illusion created by human beings that inevitably produced discontent in the midst of civilization, thereby restraining human progress.
In his own short book—titled Propaganda before that term had derived sinister implications—published in 1928, Bernays put forth a theme compatible with his uncle’s psychoanalytic concepts. Bernays argued that an invisible government, the “true ruling power of our country,” manipulates democratic societies, such that a relatively small elite “pull the wires which control the public mind.” He defined propaganda as “a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea or group.”[1] While he avoided attacking religion directly, Bernays advocated a conscious manipulation of public opinion by appealing to people through subtle psychologically constructed images and messages.
The message was not lost on the ACLU. Attacking religion head-on would be far less effective that attacking religion as a prejudice – a prejudice that blocked the expression of other religions, as well as a prejudice that blocked human advancement through restraining science. Science, viewed from this perspective, itself becomes a competing religion – a competing set of beliefs that puts human beings at the center of their own salvation, not in some future kingdom in the after-life, but in the here and now. In other words, a civilization anxious for material advancements could be repositioned to see God as a barrier to a religion that transcended belief in God – to a science predicated on human knowledge that promised advancements in a wide range of fields, including the health sciences, possibly even life-extension, and certainly in the evolution of future human beings as an advanced species unto themselves..
In retrospect, the ACLU seized upon the Scopes Trial as if its objective from the beginning was not to champion evolution per se, but to see God banned from all public spaces in America, with science put in the place of God. In its war against God, championing evolution became a means to an end, not an end in itself. Somehow, the American public had to be convinced that the only way to preserve religious freedom was to ban every vestige of government support for religious expression in the public arena. That God could ever be banned completely from the public sphere was an idea our Founding Fathers would never have contemplated, given the pains they took to write the language of the First Amendment so as to protect religious expression in America. For our Founding Fathers, religious freedom was so important the amendment designed to preserve religious freedom was positioned first in specifying the Bill of Rights. For the lawyers of the ACLU, eliminating God from America would be difficult, but after the Scopes Trial, not impossible. With the Scopes Trial, the ACLU lawyers had managed to elevate science to the status of a religion, now all that was needed was to elevate atheism to the status of a religion.
Marcuse and the Frankfurt School took the next step of combining Marx and Freud. If all sexual practices are argued to be equivalent behavior resulting from impulses tracing back to birth, then no sexual practice, regardless how extreme or bizarre, can be ruled to be learned or an aberration of human nature. This is the fundamental power of Freud and Marx. If God is merely an idea created by human beings, or if atheistic views are to prevail, then no God exists to set limits on acceptable human practices. If moral behavior is determined by allowing individuals with “rights” to engage in behavior those rights presume, than what moral bound is there to lust?
Now homosexuals have openly bragged that a cleverly crafted public relations campaign is a major reason the LGBT agenda is today increasingly being considered favorably. What prevents pederasts, pedophiles, polygamists, as well as those who practice bestiality and necrophilia, from designing public relations campaigns of their own?
At a certain point, Kirk and Madsen are probably right that the public will tire of the entire discussion and simply give up, preferring to turn a blind eye to all forms of sexual behavior found distasteful. At that point, sexual behavior is reduced to being little more than a fashion, much like a change of clothes, with no moral implications left worth serious thought or contemplation.
[1] Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda, originally published 1928, available online at Internet Archive, www.archive.org/stream/EdwardLBernays-Propaganda/Edward_L_Bernays_-_Propaganda#page/n1/mode/2up (accessed Feb. 18, 2012).